Small Changes, Big Wins: Atomic Habits for Athletes
- sqspsychology
- Feb 4
- 11 min read
Updated: Feb 6
The Importance Of Habits
Great athletes aren’t just made in the heat of competition; they’re built through the small, consistent habits that shape their everyday lives. Olympic champion Michael Phelps famously credits his success not just to his talent but to the habits he’s perfected over years—repeating the same warm-up routine, visualising success, and sticking to an unwavering schedule. These habits might seem insignificant on their own, but together, they create a foundation for greatness. In this blog, we’ll explore how you can apply the principles of James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits’ to make small changes that transform your performance, recovery, and motivation.
The Power of Marginal Gains – Sir David Brailsford and GB Cycling.
Success in sport often seems to hinge on dramatic breakthroughs, but David Brailsford, the performance director of British Cycling from 2003, believed success was built on the smallest of changes. Brailsford’s philosophy, known as “marginal gains,” was rooted in the idea that if every aspect of cycling could be improved by just 1%, the cumulative impact would result in extraordinary outcomes.
To bring his philosophy to life, Brailsford introduced a culture of relentless improvement within British Cycling. His team meticulously analysed every detail that could affect performance, from teaching athletes how to correctly wash their hands the most effective way to prevent illness, to ensuring they travelled with their own pillows for optimal sleep. These seemingly minor changes created a transformative environment. Under Brailsford’s leadership, British Cycling became a dominant force in international cycling, achieving unprecedented success at global competitions over the next decade and inspiring a generation of athletes.
Progress Melts the Ice Cube. When an ice cube leaves freezing conditions, nobody notices it small change from -8°C to -7°C, but progress is still happening. These small, incremental changes accumulate over time until a tipping point is reached, when the effects of the stored progress become visible and the ice turns to water. Similarly, the extra effort an athlete puts into not skipping sets in the gym, finishing every run, or perfecting their recovery routine might seem invisible day to day. However, these efforts are quietly building towards a moment of transformation, where the results of consistent effort suddenly become clear.
Brailsford’s methods also highlight the importance of focusing on systems rather than goals. As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits: “Winners and losers have the same goals.” Goals, like winning a race or achieving a personal best, are common to everyone, but they don’t guarantee success. What sets winners apart is the systems they use—the daily habits and routines that consistently drive improvement. Stretching regularly, sleeping well, and eating properly might seem unremarkable, but they’re the foundation of long-term performance.
Actionable Tip for Readers: If you’re looking to take your performance to the next level, try Brailsford’s approach. Start by writing down everything that contributes to success in your sport—training routines, recovery practices, nutrition, mindset, and so on. Then, review your list and ask yourself: what could be improved by just 1%? It might be refining your warm-up, dedicating more time to recovery, or ensuring you stick to a proper sleep schedule. By committing to small, incremental changes, you can create your own system for success and build towards your goals with confidence.
To truly maximise performance, athletes must go beyond simply understanding the value of small improvements. They must also learn how to build better habits that support their goals. Fortunately, the science of habits offers a clear framework for doing so. Psychologist Edward Thorndike once said;
“Behaviours followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated.”
This principle forms the foundation of habit formation: when actions lead to positive outcomes, they are reinforced and become automatic over time.
Habits are built through a cycle of four key components: cue, craving, response, and reward. A cue triggers the brain to initiate a behaviour, but cues are only meaningful when interpreted correctly—for example, a notification sound becomes significant only when associated with receiving a text. Cravings are the motivational force behind every habit, providing the reason to act. An important distinction to make; we do not crave the habit itself but the change it delivers. For instance, it’s not the act of taking an ice bath we desire, but the improved recovery it provides. The response is the action we take, influenced by how much friction—how difficult or costly—it feels to execute. Finally, the reward satisfies the craving and teaches the brain which behaviours are worth repeating.
To build good habits that stick, athletes need to make them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying—the four laws of behaviour change. The remainder of this blog will explore each of these principles in detail, providing actionable strategies for integrating them into your routines. Whether it’s creating clear cues to prompt recovery work, reducing friction to make training easier to start, or ensuring your efforts lead to rewarding outcomes, these small adjustments can have a transformative impact on your performance.
Law 1 - Make It Obvious
The Best Way to Start a New Habit
Habits are the invisible forces behind much of what we do daily. From making a cup of coffee in the morning to grabbing our keys and wallet before heading out the door, these small behaviours become automatic over time. Understanding how to harness these ingrained routines can help us build better habits and ultimately boost performance.
Have you ever bought a new shirt, only to find yourself later picking out another new shirt or two? This is explained by the psychological phenomenon called the Diderot Effect, whereby the behaviour we are about to perform is dictated by the previous behaviour. Instead of falling into the trap of buying more things, we can use this effect to our advantage by habit stacking — pairing a new habit with an existing routine to make the new behaviour easier to adopt.
Habit stacking involves attaching a new behaviour to an established routine, creating an association that prompts action. For example, you might choose to foam roll right before you jump in the shower, or you could write in your training journal immediately after eating dinner. By doing this, you set yourself up for success by making the new habit more automatic.
Actionable Tip for Readers: Take a moment to think about your daily routine. Write down a list of actions you do every day without fail—waking up, brushing your teeth, having meals, or even commuting to work. Then, choose one of these actions and pair it with a habit you’d like to develop. The key is to start small. By linking new, healthy habits to your established routines, you’ll find it easier to create lasting positive changes.
Environment > Motivation
Contrary to popular belief, motivation is not the most importat factor when it comes to starting and maintaining positive habits. While motivation can fluctuate, the cues in our surroundings remain constant and shape our behaviour, often without us realising it. Have you ever noticed how you automatically lower your voices and whisper when in a church, without being told to do so? Research shows that elite athletes don’t necessarily have more self-control than others; instead, by designing their environments to minimise distractions and temptations, they reduce the need to constantly exert self-control, conserving this limited resource for tough training sessions or high-pressure competitions where it’s most critical to their performance.
To structure your environment for success, start by making your habits obvious. Place running shoes or gym equipment where you’ll see them, or keep foam rollers and resistance bands within easy reach. At the same time, remove cues for negative habits—store snacks out of sight or leave your phone in another room to avoid distractions. By designing spaces that encourage good habits and discourage bad ones, you create a system that supports your goals without relying on fleeting motivation or sheer discipline.
Law 2 - Make It Attractive
How to Make Habits Irresistible
Dopamine is the chemical in the brain responsible for driving motivation and pleasure. It is released not only when we experience something rewarding but also when we anticipate it. For example, studies show that drug users experience a surge of dopamine when they see the drug, not when they take it, demonstrating how anticipation fuels the desire to act.
Dopamine drives motivation to act by making the anticipated rewards of a behaviour outweigh the effort required to perform it. For instance, the expectation of visible muscle growth from a gym session, or serotonin and endorphin boosts, can outweigh the perceived cost of going to the gym, which causes the action of getting up and going to the gym. The expectation of a reward is what motivates us to act, so making habits more attractive and focusing on their positive outcomes naturally compels us to engage in them.
Using Temptation Bundling to Make Habits Attractive
One effective strategy to make habits more appealing is temptation bundling — combining something you want to do, like watching Netflix or listening to your favourite podcast, with something you need to do, such as cycling on a stationary bike. By pairing the enjoyable activity with the productive one, your brain begins to associate the habit with the reward, making it feel less like a task and more like something to look forward to.
Over time, this positive association strengthens, and you may even find yourself eager to complete the habit because it’s tied to something enjoyable. Reserving your favourite podcast episodes for gym sessions creates a system where the habit becomes linked with enjoyment, making it easier to stay consistent.
Reframing Bad Habits: Turning Challenges into Opportunities
Research shows that the language we use can shape how we feel about challenging tasks. Using positive and empowering words helps our brain associate these habits with enjoyment and opportunity rather than obligation or discomfort. For example, instead of thinking, “I have to run,” you might say, “I get to build my endurance.” Similarly, reframing “I’m anxious before a race” to “My body is excited and ready to perform” can transform nerves into opportunity..
Actionable Step: 1. Identify a habit you find challenging: Choose one that feels like a chore or a source of frustration. 2. Pinpoint the negative language you associate with it: Reflect on the words or phrases you currently use when thinking about the habit. 3. Reframe it in a positive light. Highlight the benefits or opportunities the habit offers. 4. Write your new phrase somewhere visible: Use it as a daily reminder to reinforce this positive perspective and shift how you view the habit.Law 3 - Make It Easy
Pace over perfection
In high-performance sport, athletes can become so focused on identifying the best training method or strategy that they fall into the trap of overplanning instead of taking meaningful action. Neuroscientists refer to this difference as motion versus action. Motion involves planning, analysing, and strategising — important elements of elite performance — but action is where progress truly happens. It’s not the plan that leads to improvement but the repeated execution of skills, drills, and routines.
Research suggests that habit formation, or potentiation, occurs when connections between neurons in the brain strengthen through consistent activity. In other words, habits form based on frequency, not time. For elite athletes who already train and compete regularly, this highlights the importance of intentional, high-quantity of repetitions. Whether it’s refining a technical skill, committing to a mental preparation routine, or consistently performing recovery exercises, mastery is built through repetition, not perfection.
The Rule of Least Effort
We are naturally drawn to actions that provide the most value for the least effort. While elite athletes aren’t aiming to cut corners, the principle of making beneficial behaviours easier still applies. The idea isn’t just to focus on the simplest tasks—it’s to set yourself up for success by reducing unnecessary friction, making optimal actions as effortless as possible in the moment. Less energy spent overcoming friction means more energy to invest in your performance — and it becomes easier to follow through.
Small Tweaks to Make Excellence Easier
A great way to implement this principle is by optimising your environment. This means reducing the barriers to good habits and increasing the resistance to unproductive ones. Here’s some examples how:
Reduce friction for positive habits: Lay out your gym clothes and shoes the night before, so it’s easier to get up and start your day. I personally plan my running route the night before — it saves me time in the morning and makes getting out of bed feel much more manageable.
Increase friction for negative habits: Make it harder to access distractions like your phone by leaving it in another room or switching it off during key moments of focus. Keeping unhealthy snacks further away, or swapping them with nearby healthy ones, is another simple but effective way to steer your behaviour in the right direction.
How I’ve implements this into my life:
One way I’ve implemented this principle is by moving my phone charger across the room. This simple action means I’m less likely to scroll at night, which has significantly improved my sleep hygiene and quality.
By setting up your environment to make helpful behaviours easier and unproductive ones harder, you can conserve energy for what really matters. What tweaks could you make to remove friction and make excellence easier to achieve?
What small commitment could you make today that would lock in your best habits for tomorrow?Law 4 - Make It Satisfying
The Cardinal Rule of Behaviour Change
What is rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided. This simple rule underpins all behaviour change — our brains are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. If an action feels good, we’re far more likely to do it again. Take chewing gum, for example. It only became a widespread habit after Wrigley introduced flavours, making it a more pleasurable experience. The first three laws of habit formation—making it obvious, attractive, and easy—increase the likelihood of an action happening. The fourth law, making it satisfying, ensures it sticks.
The Mismatch Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards
One of the biggest challenges with building good habits is that we live in a delayed-return environment. You train today, but the improvements might not come for weeks or months. Meanwhile, bad habits often work in the opposite way — the negative consequences are delayed, but the reward is immediate. For example, smoking might damage your health long-term, but it provides instant stress relief. This mismatch, known as time inconsistency, means we naturally prioritise short-term pleasure over long-term benefits, even when we logically know what’s better for us.
How to Turn Instant Gratification to Your Advantage
The key to making good habits stick is to introduce immediate gratification. If the reward for completing a difficult task is visible now, rather than just an abstract benefit in the future, we’re more likely to keep doing it. A simple strategy is tracking progress—something as small as ticking off a day on a calendar after completing a S&C circuit can provide a satisfying sense of achievement. Another example could be setting a rule where you can only watch your favourite TV show after completing recovery work. What matters is that the reward is visible. Without a clear sign that a good habit has happened, there’s nothing reinforcing it in the moment. By making success tangible, you give your brain a reason to come back for more.
How to Recover Quickly When Your Habits Break Down
No one is perfect. Life gets in the way, and habits inevitably break down. The real problem isn’t missing once—it’s what happens next.
The key? Never miss twice. One missed session won’t ruin your progress, but two in a row starts to create a new habit—the habit of not doing it. It’s easy to think, "I’ve already slipped up, so what’s the point?" But that’s exactly how small setbacks turn into permanent failures.
Think of it like brushing your teeth. If you forget one night, your teeth won’t suddenly decay—but if you skip for a week, you’ll start to notice the effects. The same applies to habits—one missed day is just a blip, but repeatedly skipping turns into a pattern that’s much harder to undo. Instead of trying to compensate with an extreme effort, just get back to your routine as soon as possible.
Progress isn’t about perfection—it’s about showing up more often than not. Miss a day if you must, but don’t miss twice.
Conclusion: The Key to Lasting Success
Success isn’t about hitting a final milestone—it’s about continuously refining your approach. The real secret to lasting results is simple: keep improving. Progress isn’t a single achievement but an ongoing process, and the power of small habits lies not in addition, but in compounding over time. Keep going, keep focusing on the individual habits that form part of the bigger picture , and the results will take care of themselves.
This blog, based on James Clear's book Atomic Habits, has explored the four laws of behaviour change—making habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying—to help you build lasting, high-performance behaviours. Whether you’re developing new habits or refining existing ones, this blog can be a hub to revisit whenever you need direction. Use it as a guide to stay on track, or even pass it on to teammates and coaches looking to do the same. Sustainable progress comes from consistency, and these principles will always be here to help you reset, refocus, and improve.
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